Yet another book of solo piano arrangements, this time of tunes either written by or recorded by John Coltrane. The ones he wrote (most of them, at least) cannot be 'played', as of this writing, presumably due to the need to pay royalties for such 'playing'.
The arrangements in this book are by Brent Edstrom.
Another volume of solo piano arrangements, this time of tunes by Pat Metheny (and in some cases Lyle Mays).
Quite a few people of my generation seem to know of Metheny only from the Pat Metheny Group recordings. I happen to think those are amazing, but I know they do not always appeal to jazz purists. But it would be a huge mistake to think Metheny is defined by those recordings. Check out albums like 80/81, Question and Answer, Day Trip, and the recent solo acoustic recordings, such as Moon Dial. Metheny does straight jazz, too. And he writes incredible ballads!
I am a HUGE Duke Ellington fan. He wrote so much great music, and his band, at its peak, was just incredibly powerful. The great classic is Ellington at Newport, from 1956, which relaunched his career and contains one of the greatest sax solos ever. And there are Jazz Party in Stereo and the great suite Black, Brown and Beige. Not to mention the Concert of Sacred Music, which still blows me away.
I was reading a book about jazz music theory a little while ago. Repeatedly, it would say things like: Jazz musicians didn't relaly start using suspended chords until the 1960s. Except Duke, who was using them in the 30s. He was so far ahead of everyone else that it is ridiculous.
And if you don't know albums like Money Jungle (with Charles Mingus and Max Roach), then you are in for a real treat: Duke could play 'outside', too. And don't forget the amazing album he made with Coltrane in the early 60s.
This book contains arrangements of some of Duke's music. The links below are to 'official' scores on Musescore, meaning you can't download them without paying, but the complete sheet music is there, and you could play them off a tablet or something. Most helpfully, you can listen to at least some of them (played via MIDI), which is great for getting the rhythms right.
Another post of links to Musescore versions of arrangements of jazz standards. This one is of Miles Davis tunes---mostly ones he wrote, and others he recorded. The difficulty ranges from things I can play (intermediate level) to things it'll be a while until I can play.
These are 'official' scores, meaning you can't download these 'official' scores without paying (and I've already paid for the books, thank you), but the complete sheet music is there, and you could play them off a tablet or something. Most helpfully, you can listen to them (played via MIDI), which is great for getting the rhythms right.
Hal Leonard publishes some really great collections of piano solo
arrangements of jazz standards. The difficulty ranges from things I can
play (intermediate level) to things it'll be a while until I can play. The tunes in this particular book are definitely on the harder side.
These do not come with recordings, even online. Fortunately, they have started putting them on MuseScore. Not all the songs are there, presumably due to issues around who owns the copyright. You can't download these 'official' scores without paying (and I've already paid for the books, thank you), but the complete sheet music is there, and you could play them off a tablet or something. Most helpfully, you can listen to them (played via MIDI), which is great for getting the rhythms right.
Most of these are on MuseScore, as 'official' scores. That means they cannot be printed or downloaded without paying. But the full sheet music is there, so you could play them off a tablet or something. And many of them, at least, can be listened to. It's nice to be able to hear them when trying to learn the arrangement (and before deciding whether to bother).
These are nice pieces for someone at my level: They get more difficult as they go, and they're not boring. You can download the music from IMSLP. There are lots of YouTube videos about these, too.
This book contains 269 pieces by 3 composers, covering early intermediate and, I guess, just 'intermediate'. (There is a separate book of 'upper' intermediate pieces.) Some of these are also in the Early Intermediate book.
The links below are to scores on MuseScore.com, which you can both download and play, in most cases, so you can hear the piece while trying to learn it. The 'official scores' cannot be downloaded or printed, without payment, and cannot always be listened to, at this time, though my sense is that more and more of them can be. I've also included links, in some cases, to IMSLP.org, the Petrucci Music Library.
During the pandemic, I started teaching myself piano. Recently, I've been working my way through a book of 'selected piano masterpieces' from Schirmer's Library of Musical Classics: Early Intermediate Level. Of course, this is all public domain, and you can get the music online, but it's nice to have it in a book.
That said, it's also nice to be able to hear the pieces, and for that I've been using MuseScore, which is open source music notation software that will also 'play' whatever you enter into it. There's also a huge library of music that various people have uploaded into it, including a lot of the 'classics'.
So here's a list of links to versions of the pieces in the mentioned book. Note that you can download these or play them directly from the site. Please let me know if any of the links should break.
I've not found an easily printable list of these online, so here's one.
| Larghissimo | Very, very slow | 20 bpm or slower |
| Solenne/Grave | Slow and solemn | 20 - 40 bpm |
| Lento | Slowly | 40 - 60 bpm |
| Lentissimo | At a very slow tempo | 48 bpm or slower |
| Largo | Broadly | 40 - 60 bpm |
| Larghetto | Rather broadly | 60 - 66 bpm |
| Adagio | At ease, slow and stately | 66 - 76 bpm |
| Adagietto | Rather slow | 70 - 80 bpm |
| Tranquillo | Tranquil, calmly, or peaceful | 80 bpm |
| Andante | At a walking pace, moderately slow | 72 - 76 bpm |
| Andantino | Slighlty faster and more light-hearted than Andante | 73 - 83 bpm |
| Andante moderato | Between Andante and Moderato | 92 - 98 bpm |
| Moderato | Moderately | 108 - 120 bpm |
| Allegretto | Moderately fast, but less than allegro | 100 - 128 bpm |
| Allegro moderato | Moderately quick, almost Allegro | 116 - 120 bpm |
| Allegro | Fast, quickly and bright | 120 - 156 bpm |
| Vivace | Briskly, Lively and fast | 156 - 176 bpm |
| Vivacissimo | Very fast and lively, faster than Vivace | 172 - 176 bpm |
| Allegrissimo or Allegro vivace | Very Fast | 172 - 176 bpm |
| Presto | Very, very fast | 168 - 200 bpm |
| Prestissimo | Faster than Presto | 200+ bpm |
Ardour is an open source Digital Audio Workstation that runs on Linux, OSX, and Windows. They provide binaries, but require payment for them. I'll probably subscribe, just to help them out, but I decided to compile it myself first, so I could check it out. To do that, I had to install a number of libraries. Namely, these ones:
boost boost-devel glibmm2.4-devel sndfile-devel sndfile libsndfile-devel libcurl-devel libarchive-devel libcurl-devel liblo-devel taglib-devel vamp-plugin-sdk-devel rubberband-devel aubio-devel lv2-devel serd-devel sord-devel libudev-devel libusb-devel libusb1-devel cppunit-devel libwebsockets-devel pangomm*devel liblrdf-devel sratom-devel lilv-devel lilv-{devel,libs} gtkmm*devel
I don't think I needed absolutely all of that, and you may need to install other things, too, but that will get you going.
Once the headers were installed, compilation was pretty painless.
The appropriately named Enter is the first album from the Dutch symphonic metal band Within Temptation (who just finished a tour of the US opening for Iron Maiden). They had also released an EP, Restless, in 1997.
It's really quite varied, ranging from almost purely orchestral pieces to some pretty heavy metal. Sharon den Adel, the vocalist, has the usual amazing voice that seems to characterize these bands. It's not just that she sounds pretty, but she really knows how to use those pipes, as well. Like many symphonic metal bands, though, the vocals mix the 'clean' sound of den Adel's voice with growled vocals from Robert Westerholt. This is the so-called 'beauty and the beast' effect.
For a first album, this is really very impressive. Their sound is well established. And although their music is not as complex as that of Epica or Nightwish or Ayreon, it's still got more than enough to keep me interested, and that's not always easy to do.
The real highlight for me is "Gatekeeper", which is one of the heavier numbers on the album. It opens with a lovely orchestral passage which flows smoothly into heavily distorted guitars, which eases back into a more orchestral section, though that's overlayed with drums. The introduction complete, the song moves into a second section, featuring power chords and then a simple but effective guitar riff. The vocals begin in the growled style, with choral voices behind, until Den Adel at the chorus. It's really a powerful song.
The first of the symphonic metal bands I discovered was Epica, which was founded by Mark Jansen, who has previously been in one the first symphonic metal bands, After Forever. As it happened, he was dating Simone Simons at the time, who could sing, so he invited her to front the band. And damn can she sing! (Check out her performance, with Floor Jansen, of "Stabat Mater" on Retrospect.)
I'm working my way through their catalog. Having started my own listening with some more recent stuff, I've gone back to the beginning.
The first album, released in 2002, was The Phantom Agony. It opens with a statement of intent, the choral piece "Adyta", sliding smoothly into a pretty typical sort of Epica piece in "Sensorium". But things really get going with the third song, "Cry For the Moon", which seems to remain a favorite with a lot of Epicans (as fans are known). It's very much symphonic metal, with symphonic elements but a driving metal beat, Simons's gorgeous vocals backed by a choir (though her voice may be overdubbed as part of that, too).
That song is a continuation of a song cycle, "The Embrace That Smothers" that Jansen had begun with After Forever. Wikipedia describes it as being about 'the dangers of organized religion', which would be putting it kindly. Two more parts appear hear, the rest being on The Divine Conspiracy. I mean at some point to listen to all nine parts of it together.
Much of the rest of the album has a similar theme. Indeed, the whole thing feels like a concept album, organized around a person's search for meaning and struggle with religion.
It's not a mature effort. Jansen and Simons and the others are clearly still learning to harness their compositional talents. But the highlights here are fantastic, such as title track, especially.
This afternoon, while doing various sorts of work, I listened to the first three albums by the Dutch symphonic metal band After Forever. One of the founding members of this band was Mark Jansen, who would later found Epica, and the vocalist was Floor Jansen (no relation), who is now the vocalist for Nightwish. Mark Jansen left after the second album; there were three more after that.
The first two albums are Prison of Desire and Decipher. I don't think these are quite up to what Mark Jansen would shortly do with Epica, but you can see the seeds of that music here. They do a great job integrating the orchestral elements with the rock elements, and Floor is, as always, just brilliant on vocals. (There are also growled, metal-style vocals, which Mark Jansen would continue with Epica. The contrast between these is sometimes called 'beauty and the beast'.)
The third album, Invisible Circle, is a really ambitious concept album, telling the story of an extremely dysfunctional family and how the cycle of abuse perpetuates itself. It's depressing and sad, as you'd expect, but insightful and powerful. It's not uniformly successful, but there is some pretty good stuff here. It's a bit more on the progressive metal end, with some obvious elements of bands like Yes and ELP.
Indeed, it sometimes feels to me like Yes is a major influence (perhaps at a remove) on this stuff. A lot of the 'clean' female vocals remind me of Jon Anderson's vocal style. (Yeah, I'm very into Yes.)
A couple months ago, I saw John Petrucci, from Dream Theater, touring in support of his solo album Terminal Velocity. It was a great show. Opening was Meanstreak, whom I'd not heard of before. As it turns out, they were one of the first all-woman metal bands, though they've been inactive for many years. (And, as it also happens, three of the women in the band would eventually marry members of Dream Theater.)
After the show, I did a lot of reading about women in metal, my curiosity piqued. I'm not, generally speaking, a big metal-head, but I have enjoyed some music of that kind. I really like Mastodon's albums Blood Mountain and, especially, Crack the Skye, and of course King Crimson, one of my all-time favorite bands, inspired a lot of metal, especially on the more progressive end.
Eventually, I stumbled upon 'symphonic' metal: These bands are often fronted by women. If you haven't heard this stuff, it may sound almost impossible. And it's easy to imagine how mixing metal with symphonic elements could go horribly wrong (as, indeed, it sometimes does). But the best bands in this tradition are just amazing, and I've been blown away by Epica and Nightwish, especially, and frantically started collecting their albums on vinyl. As it happened, Epica was playing up in Boston (opening for Sabaton) just a couple weeks after I saw Petrucci, so my partner and I were able to see them.
There are a lot of other bands in this tradition, and I'm going to use the blog to record some thoughts about some of them.
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Ralph Towner, Solstice (ECM, 1975)
